Mike Patton (Faith No More, Mondo Cane) and renowned French composer Jean-Claude Vannier, share the final glimpse into their new album by way of the album track ‘Browning’ ahead of the release of Corpse Flower (Ipecac Recordings, Sept 13th).

A variety of musicians, both in Los Angeles and Paris, took part in the recording of Corpse Flower with the Los Angeles team including Smokey Hormel (Beck, Johnny Cash), Justin Meldal-Johnsen (Beck, Air, Nine Inch Nails) and James Gadson (Beck, Jamie Lidell). The Parisian players are Denys Lable, Bernard Paganotti (Magma), Daniel Ciampolini, Didier Malherbe, Léonard Le Cloarec and the Bécon Palace String Ensemble. The lyrics for “Ballad C.3.3.” are drawn from Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol”’ poem, which was initially published using the name C.3.3.

Corpse Flower is available now for pre-orders (http://smarturl.it/CorpseFlower), including special embossed versions featuring Kenro Izu’s stunning cover photo. The album will be available on 180gram coloured vinyl, as well as a CD digipak and digitally.

Clara Engel’s 2017 album, Songs for Leonora Carrington rather impressed us here at Aural Aggravation. So we were pretty pleased to learn she has a new album almost ready. Entitled Where a CityONce Drowned, the album features six new songs, ‘with an instrumentation of voice, electric guitar, cello, guitalele, hammond organ, synthesizer, banjo, electric koto, bass, harmonium, and bowed glockenspiel’.

She says, ‘it is populated by dogs that race through the night sky, the Russian witch Baba Yaga, a meditation on deep time and climate change, wild goats, and a song that arose from looking at a book of Tarkovsky’s polaroids. These songs feel like a product of my time, and also reflect how out-of-step I often feel with my time.

‘I recorded the basis for the album in Bethlehem PA, in the final hours of December 4th, 2018, with Taylor Galassi accompanying me on cello. The last time Taylor and I worked together was in 2009, when we recorded The Bethelehem Tapes — also live-off-the-floor, in one sitting. It felt wonderful and seamless to work together again.’

She’s shared a taster here, and it’s beautiful:

…and we’re very much looking forward to hearing the whole album…. an when we do, you’ll be the first to know.

The seventh record by Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Luciferian Towers, will be released 22nd September 2017 on Constellation. As a taster, they’ve unveiled the album’s opening track, ‘Undoing a Luciferian Towers’, on line.

We’ll spare any extensive preamble or detail about the album here, and shall instead get to the important business: listen to ‘Undoing a Luciferian Towers’ here:

Confidence in a band’s abilities is a good thing. And in context, this is impotent: history shows that even in 1981, Andrew Eldritch was convinced that The Sisters of Mercy were an important band. He’s been proven right, but could very easily have been forgotten and disappeared into the musical morass of the post-punk era, leaving a handful of interviews with one more egotistical tosser languishing in obscure and long-forgotten zines.

Greek goths The Black Capes aren’t lacking in confidence, as their bio indicates: ‘Lamentations about the fading glorious times of gothic culture may very well come to an end with the arrival of The Black Capes. Where great icons such as Type O Negative, The 69 Eyes or The Sisters Of Mercy have been unchallenged in the gothic Olympus, finally there is a worthy successor from Athens.’

But with the opening bars of ‘Sarah the Witch’, I’m hearing technical goth-metal overtones and catch a strong whiff of cliché (and I’m not going to comment on the press shots). Much as I admire their balls – metaphorically – I can’t entirely buy into the hype. All These Monsters isn’t a bad album by any stretch, and against chunky, chugging guitars, it packs in a proliferation of nagging, hooky choruses.

‘Now Rise’ packs the chunk of Killing Joke and a claustrophobic verse dominated by a thick bass with some roaring metal vocals which tear into the verses. Elsewhere, the picked lead guitar work on ‘New Life’ is pure First and Last and Always era Sisters, but the throaty vocals are more Fields of the Nephilim, and the overall effect is diminished by its obvious drawing on pre-existent sources, in that it boils it all down to a derivative, Sisters of Murphy type amalgamation.

But The Black Capes are very much mistaken if they truly believe they’re the saviour of goth. They’re too much straight-ahead rock for a start. As such, it leans very much more toward Type O (are they really considered ‘icons’ of ‘goth’?) and equally sits more with the mid to late 80s second wave as represented by rock-orientated contemporaries like Gene Loves Jezebel and Rose of Avalanche than post-punk progenitors like The Sisters or Siouxsie. Ultimately, All These Monsters is adequate, but uninspired and unremarkable, and seems to largely miss the connection with the roots of the genre the band claims to be so keen to reinvigorate.